Diabetes: Glooko’s new population tracker highlights at-risk patients

California diabetes management company Glooko Inc. this month unveiled its new Population Tracker, offering health systems patient monitoring that aims to keep track of at-risk patients and reduce hospitalizations.

The new tracker aggregates data from Glooko’s MeterSync system, which is comprised of a glucose meter connector, a smartphone app and slate of web tools. The device allows patients to connect a wide variety of blood glucose meters directly to their smartphones to log and track their routine blood tests, rather than managing paper logs.

The new Population Tracker collects data from the smartphone application into a provider platform, flagging patients experiencing unhealthy highs or lows in blood glucose levels, providing an opportunity for outreach before patients end up in the hospital.

"Our mission is to create positive outcomes and lower costs to the health system through the right combination of patient engagement, provider engagement and population management analytics," Glooko CEO Rick Altinger said in prepared remarks. "Glooko Population Tracker tackles the costs of diabetes complications by putting the power of meaningful interventions in the hands of clinicians and care managers before complications show up in their patient population."

The provider patient monitoring system is "step 2" in Glooko’s diabetes management paradigm, Altinger told MassDevice.com in an interview last year. Engaging providers and health systems is a big part of Glooko’s financial model, and the company’s latest FDA win granted the company permission to launch the healthcare provider portal

The system
can help healthcare providers find and target diabetes patients who risk developing complications. Hand-logged glucose diaries are notoriously unreliable and incomplete, making it a challenge for any diabetes clinician hoping to glean trends, but data pulled straight from a testing device can produce a much better picture of a patient’s blood glucose profile.

"So how do you find those patients that are out of control?" Altinger told us. "What we’re solving for is finding that high-dollar patient, that patient that has complications and risks, and to do that, given that these patients have a lot of preferences as to what meters they use, you need a platform that connects to all these different devices, brings data, puts it in the cloud, and then lets you look at it in the back end to understand it and drill in on the at-risk patients."

At DeviceTalks Boston, Tyler Shultz will give attendees an inside look at Theranos and how he was able to sound the alarm after he realized the company was falling apart. Shultz will take attendees behind the story that everyone is talking about: the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and her diagnostic company, Theranos.